Richard took a step toward the display screen — toward the evidence, toward the image of the thing he needed gone — and the security guard’s hand closed hard around his arm.

“Don’t touch the equipment, sir.”

“Get your hands off me!” And my husband, the polished corporate man who smiled at the neighbors, lost the last of his mask entirely, and shoved the guard, and shouted a sentence he could never take back, in front of a doctor and a nurse and a security officer and his wife: “That capsule belongs to me!”

Nobody in the room so much as breathed.

I looked at him — really looked at him — the way you look at a stranger who wandered into your life one day and somehow ended up with your home, your bed, and your heart.

“Thank you,” I said, quietly.